It’s very laudable to ask the community here about certain projects, and whether the community wants them or not. But it feels a bit … meaningless in many cases. Of course we want all the things (almost always)!
The technical discussions are maybe a bit useful, although in the end we outside can’t match the insights and expertise of the researchers at DFINITY, so that part also has limited signal.
But where I think the community really can express a meaningful opinion is in terms of priorities. Yes, we want all the things. But do we think custom domains names are more important than Bitcoin integration? Or maybe process separation is it?
This leads me to a vision where, as a community member or neuron stakeholder, I can express this by continuously ranking the existing proposals and projects on some webpage, which then aggregates these votes into a community approved priority list. I believe this list could be actually helpful for DFINITY as they allocate their ever scarce resources.
(I could nerd out about how to aggregate such ranked votes, but that would be a distraction.)
I think this raises an interesting point around the role of the foundation vs that of the community. In an ideal world, that “vs” would be more or less gone and everything would be done in partnership.
i would like to see ICP continue to transition closer to an opensource software development model, as opposed to it working more like a traditional company developing something and asking users for feedback (or giving them a rubber-stamp yes/no vote on things).
I can see from the roadmap section it is shifting in that direction, which is a good sign. And I recognise that for something that is very complex, it would take some time to shift completely towards a DAO and some central leadership is helpful still. But I do think a truly open roadmap, where dfinity simply goes through the same process as any community member in making proposals, discussing them, voting on priorities and then tracking development would be a good next step forward.
It can only enhance the engagement of all involved, as a community, rather than a company with users.
I agree with this 100% Dfinity has an amazing staff, so only a handful of us can say much in the technical end.
However, since the vast majority of proposals are pretty non controversial, largely because of feedback from the community, the next step is to determine priority. I think at the moment it is fine but I could easily see in short time it getting bogged down.
Additionally having a community based prioritization could help from a marketing angle. The crypto community seems to really line linear graphs with upcoming updates in order. Right now it’s more of a fruit salad. Tons of stuff going on but not a clear sense of priority or timing.
Welcome to the community. I resonate well with what you said.
And it also got me thinking. Dfinity got the whole thing started and have their hands full to guide us for the next few steps. And that’s what they should be concentrating on. The notion of building the community should come from the community. Right now there are many people taking part and working on this project. Lots of collaboration happening. That’s great. But I don’t sense any holistic structure. It’s all over the place. Everybody has their own agenda (lots of individual creation), but lacking collective structure. Granted, it’s still very early, but we got to start moving with this. There is a need to build structured community gardens, to have them interact between themselves and the Dfinity, to take part in NNS governance, and to have a clear overview of the community. This would provide deeper insight into NNS as well, and enable better open-source contribution. Eventually, Dfinity could become “just a garden” in the whole IC community.
An example of a garden is CycleDAO, which is built on a community-built neuron management solution Axon.
Speaking for myself here rather than DFINITY, I agree with @integral_wizard’s point (if I understand it correctly) that this is something that could be built by the community.
I worked on a “roadmap prediction market” (background) for the internal hackathon a couple of weeks ago. I only had a few hours to spend on it so it’s not something I am eager to share publicly (or unfortunately have time to continue working on), but I believe something like that might be useful. It could be based on the amount of staked ICP (maybe logarithmically scaled); or it could simply award every user a fixed number of play tokens to vote with (protected by a captcha or something); or anything else.
I’m pretty convinced (although again, speaking for myself) that DFINITY would seriously take something like that into account for planning. (And eventually, when the IC code is fully open sourced, the developers in the community would find it valuable.)
I’m not sure if this is the point of CycleDAO already (?), but along the lines you suggest, perhaps it would make sense to form a “community garden” with the explicit purpose of understanding - from a community perspective - how to transition ICP to being fully community-run in time?
To your point about lack of collective structure, such a group could perhaps put forward concrete ideas (and even a roadmap) for that transition, which would provide a good starting point to sit down with Dominic and others in Dfinity to help make it happen over time.
Also nothing stopping it from creating it’s own prototypes of things, such as the roadmap voting tool suggested by free.